Look, let's be utterly clear - putting "barriers", "incentives" or whatever hogwash people try to wrap this up in, to force people to step up their game on the *lowest* level of raiding is doomed to failure from square zero.

People don't want to learn in their hobbies. We want to, but we're not every person on the planet, and neither are we the righteous defenders of the "Right Way (TM)". If you try and punish people for not learning, people will just give LFR up.

Good riddance you say? Think again! LFR is one of the two (Flex being the other) reasons we probably still have raids nowadays. A quick glance at WoWprogress puts about 200k players doing Normal or higher. Even with a VERY conservative 6mil players that means 3% of the playerbase. Even if I made a 100% mistake, we're still talking about less than 1 player in 10. In short - without LFR and Flex, Raids are about as used as a class questline would be.

In short, Blizzard *needs* those people much more than they need Heroic raiders, or even Normal raiders. I'd even wager that the current LFR population still trumps Flex by a large margin. This is the simple and ugly thruth that needs to be drilled in many skulls right now: The game *needs* a kindergarden level. People don't learn in LFR not because there's no push to learn, but because if there was a push to learn, they'd desert LFR, and that would probably hurt raiding as a whole in the near future (think FL and DS).

Because every single person who plays this game plays to raid right? No one ever pvps or does anything else.

"LFR is one of the reasons we still have raids" What sort of delusional fantasy world do you live in where you even think this is remotely true?

Teranoid wrote:Because every single person who plays this game plays to raid right? No one ever pvps or does anything else.

"LFR is one of the reasons we still have raids" What sort of delusional fantasy world do you live in where you even think this is remotely true?

The world of money, dear boy. Seriously, if LFR hadn't dropped and been the runaway success it was (in terms of players), I'd be betting donuts raids in MoP would have been *much* easier on Normal than what we got, and/or probably been one third smaller.

Actually, the situation isn't saved by any strech of the imagination. Consider exactly how much raiding has changed this x-pack - zilch. Flex is just LFR for pros and hoes. Meanwhile, there has been:

ScenariosDungeon ChallengesHeroic ScenariosDailies out the wazooTwo different iterations of dynamic zones

Raids are the poster boys of WoW - super cool and great to show off, but actually a bitch to maintain and pay for.

When that day comes, seek all the light and wonder of this world, and fight.

Look, let's be utterly clear - putting "barriers", "incentives" or whatever hogwash people try to wrap this up in, to force people to step up their game on the *lowest* level of raiding is doomed to failure from square zero.

People don't want to learn in their hobbies. We want to, but we're not every person on the planet, and neither are we the righteous defenders of the "Right Way (TM)". If you try and punish people for not learning, people will just give LFR up.

Good riddance you say? Think again! LFR is one of the two (Flex being the other) reasons we probably still have raids nowadays. A quick glance at WoWprogress puts about 200k players doing Normal or higher. Even with a VERY conservative 6mil players that means 3% of the playerbase. Even if I made a 100% mistake, we're still talking about less than 1 player in 10. In short - without LFR and Flex, Raids are about as used as a class questline would be.

In short, Blizzard *needs* those people much more than they need Heroic raiders, or even Normal raiders. I'd even wager that the current LFR population still trumps Flex by a large margin. This is the simple and ugly thruth that needs to be drilled in many skulls right now: The game *needs* a kindergarden level. People don't learn in LFR not because there's no push to learn, but because if there was a push to learn, they'd desert LFR, and that would probably hurt raiding as a whole in the near future (think FL and DS).

First of all it's not true that they would ever remove raiding from the game. Blizzard know that if they did that they would lose their most dedicated customers, the ones who keep their subscription for years on end, the ones who keep server economies ticking and provide the bulk of the tanks and healers. The game would fall apart at max level overnight if they did that. I think you grossly under-estimate the importance of the more dedicated players.

Nobody is expecting LFR players to play at 90% of their potential, nobody has made any such suggestion. I don't think it's too much to ask for that on LFR players are not AFK or merely auto attacking. I also don't think it's too much to ask that after the first week LFR players have a rudimentary knowledge of the boss of the sort that can be summed up in less than 10 words (Nazgrim: Kill adds, don't attack during defensive stance*). Maybe even a silver medal on Proving Grounds.

There are many things that Blizzard could do to make LFR a less toxic place to be and to raise the level of the player base but they have done nothing. SoO LFR is so bad that anyone who can avoid going there doesn't bother with it when before they may have done so to refine their DPS or to "win at Skada".

*maybe have an NPC (in this case Gamon) say words to that effect before each boss and after every wipe.

Nooska wrote:So tell me, do I not know how to play as a BM hunter? Or is it more likely that damage output isn't as clear cut as you are making it out to be to further your standpoint?

Whether 50k dps at 450 ilvl is achievable or not is neither here nor there

I would tend to agree, I was reacting to a strawman.

@Worldie: hc geared 90 is not ilvl 450, it is a full tier higher at 463 (assuming hc geared means heroic dungeons).

As to why 3 heal Elegon? well it helped a lot on non perfect healers that had a tendency to get OOR of someone that then died. Weh healers got it right, we could go to 2 healing so we had a full dps on each spark, but with 2 tanks helping out it wasn't actually THAT needed.Also, 3 healing *used* to be the setup for regular 10 man normal mode raiding - sinc eI haven't been in 10 man normal mode since T14, I won't say anything about today.

Worldie wrote:And Sagara, you got a point. My point however was, if they really want LFR to be "kindergarden", it shouldn't be tuned for needing 2-3 high level players to boost the remaining crowd. Because atm, if such players are missing (whenever they are egocentric idiots or actual positive people) the chance of success on lessfacerollable bosses is nil.

I have a guess on that:My guess is that it is balanced that way because that is who is in LFR on average (over the entire LFR player base). If my guess is correct, then if enough skilled players (relative to the amount playing LFR) stopped doing LFR over a long enough period of time, I would bet they would nerf LFR to compensate. I am guessing they balance it based on the number of people doing LFR and how far the average LFR succeeds among other reason. Losing a significant amount of skilled players long enough would probably cause a re-balance of LFR difficulty at some point.

That means it sucks if you get in a group that loses those 2-3, but on average most groups don't run into that problem often enough.

LFR needs to be neutered more than it already is, primarily because of the impact Flex has had on it. Most of the raiders I know won't touch it at all now, even on alts, because of the lowering of the skill level of the average player in there.

Flex however, seems tuned just about right.

But to expect more of the LFR player?.. please... you have 8 year olds and 55 year olds and everything in between, folks who farm 50 hours a week, and people who play 4 hours a week.. to expect that a "push button to join a queue" raid is going to be anything more than a gear grind is dreaming...

Amirya wrote:... because everyone needs a Catagonskin rug.

twinkfist wrote:i feel bad for the Mogu...having to deal with alcoholic bears.

Tecnically this game is rated 18+ as far as i know so 8 yr old shouldn't be playing at all

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

12+ on the ESRB in Europe. And that's nitpicking and dodging the point. Halabar has the gist of it: LFR isn't for us anymore. The last thing we need to get things in good order is a serious update to the in-game calendar to provide something similar to OpenRaid for Flex (and other stuff).

That way, LFR only exist if we're insane enough to need LFR pieces (not much of a problem this tier), or for bored unexpected free nights.

When that day comes, seek all the light and wonder of this world, and fight.

Tanked wing 3 tonight - a Sunday night, not the best time to do a new LFR.

Arrived when there were 2 stacks of determination on the first boss, but he died fairly easily (4 stacks maybe?).

Spoils was a nightmare. Luckily I had read up in advance and figured out how to divide the groups, but wow, that is a tough fight for LFR. Not just dividing groups. Not just some idiot DK zoning in, starting the encounter and zoning out. But that one group can succeed and then die because the other group fails... that's just cruel. And you can't really see what's going on in the other group, so tweaking the two halves of the raid is difficult. (I went 10 vs 15 for most of it).

Thok was not a push over either. Pretty nasty to melee. The dps kept all dying. Had about 4 stacks when he died.

I probably spent about 3 hours in there. And all I got was a cloak. It was a lot of fun. It felt like a real progression raid. But with the rewards, the time investment (and the unpleasantness in the aftermath of wipes) mean that I doubt I'll do it repeatedly. I'll probably do wing 4, then never return.

Probably means I will bank my alts too. No way I am gearing them up through that.

Last edited by econ21 on Sun Oct 13, 2013 5:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I do wonder if the people in LFR are really looking for "raid" at all, it's quite possible that they're simply looking for gear, and LFR is effectively the end game for gearing for a large proportion of the playerbase.

I mean RPG's are primarily based on the idea of bettering or improving your character. The story seems secondary in WoW at least.

It would be an interesting to see if the Timeless Isle gear got buffed to 528ilvl whether the experience in LFR would improve.

The fun part of raiding is going in as a group and cooperating about solving a problem (killing bosses). Wipes are an essential part of that - if you get it on first try all the time, there's no challenge, so no fun.

But wiping in LFR is no fun. It doesn't feel like a challenge you can overcome, it just feels like you're stuck in something you can't get out of. There's no feeling of accomplishment when the boss dies, it's what you expect going in. So all that's left is the gear treadmill.

Malk is dead-easy. The only way to wipe on this is to not stack in phase 2, and you won't wipe there either if your healers are on the ball with massive CDs. Nothing else does enough damage to hurt the group - smashes, breaths, not-soaking-pools, none of that seems to matter. Even failing the tank swap will only get the tank killed once, which is just solved with a rez.

Thok is also dead easy. The dino chomping people only does about a third of their health instead of killing them outright, and screeches are spaced out enough to not matter. Didn't have a single wipe on either of those.

I ended up asking for assist each time to set groups - put the best two healers and me on one side, the other three healers on the other side, and switched to my DPS spec. That usually seemed to work.

As far as the "gearing alts" thing - look around for guilds for "set" flex groups that you can sneak into. If you can get into one and do ok, you'll almost always be welcome to run subsequent weeks.

I've been really lucky - the guild that I run my hunter with (I jumped in as a PuG when they were 2/13H in ToT, and they simply never stopped inviting me *chuckle*) runs like 5 different full-flex runs a week. So I got a full run with my shaman, priest, and druid in this week with them. Those groups will wipe at times (lots of semi-undergeared alts going on those runs), but we haven't had to call one off short of finishing yet.

Most people want the wealth produced by a society with limited government distributed to them more generously by bigger government.

This weekend - three P3 runs of LFR on three different chars. One shot all bosses except for Thok on two of the runs, but those wipes were down to people not following the simple instructions about which end of him to hit (i.e. neither - try the side).

So my experience does not really support the hypothesis. However, I agree with the sentiment that Looking For Zerg is just a gear run and has nothing to do with raiding.

That the "top" level of each expac is constant, mindless running of the same "raiding" instances over and over again is why I will not be renewing my subscription in a couple of months when it lapses. Wrong timezone and wrong region to try changing that by joining a proper raiding guild.

Winkle wrote:I do wonder if the people in LFR are really looking for "raid" at all, it's quite possible that they're simply looking for gear, and LFR is effectively the end game for gearing for a large proportion of the playerbase.

I mean RPG's are primarily based on the idea of bettering or improving your character. The story seems secondary in WoW at least.

It would be an interesting to see if the Timeless Isle gear got buffed to 528ilvl whether the experience in LFR would improve.

Paxen wrote:The fun part of raiding is going in as a group and cooperating about solving a problem (killing bosses). Wipes are an essential part of that - if you get it on first try all the time, there's no challenge, so no fun.

But wiping in LFR is no fun. It doesn't feel like a challenge you can overcome, it just feels like you're stuck in something you can't get out of. There's no feeling of accomplishment when the boss dies, it's what you expect going in. So all that's left is the gear treadmill.

Yup. Which is why even Blizzard admitted LFR failed the original aim of being a enjoyable adventure for players who can't commit to a raid schedule.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

I understand the frustration with some of the LFR groups you wind up in. Believe me, I've seen it all and then some. All I can say is that if it's not your thing, don't do it. But if you enjoy raiding, you should embrace LFR. Oh I said it. I'm not saying you should participate in it, but you should embrace it as a necessary part of the game. Without LFR, over 90% of the player base would NEVER see the inside of current raid content. The average LFR player wants to hop in a raid, at their convenience, without worrying about meglomaniacle GM's, idiotic or biased loot rules, and/or varying day to day work/life requirements. It is also their endgame, especially on alts, as far as gearing is concerned. Add more than bare bones entrance requirements, and the super casuals, ie: most of the player base, will stop using it and lose a major reason to keep subscribing.

So why embrace LFR? Well, here comes Captain Obvious: All the effort, design, and programming hours that go into cranking out shiny, new, expansive raid content can not be justified under any business plan to cater to about 3% of the subscriber base. You like new, impressive raids with cool new bosses and abilities, yes? Well the LFR base provides the justification for investing into new raids. So get over it. Without LFR, the game will very quickly become overwhelmingly solo content.

And to the whole, "well tanks and healers could take all their marbles and go home and WoW would implode!" line of reasoning: get over yourselves. It's actually just the opposite. Without raid content and especially with the ongoing skill homogenization, tanks and healers could very easily find themselves out of work and out of demand. The genie is already out of the bottle, and there's no putting it back in. Casuals own WoW now. They OWN it. Dismiss them and there will be a giant Ross Perot-type sucking sound of subscription loss. And when was WoW ever so hardcore anyway? I remember during Vanilla when other players made fun of WoW and called it Hello Kitty Island. And WoW crushed, CRUSHED every other mmo out there. There's lesson there for anyone that can put down the rose colored glasses and think about it from a business perspective.

That was a cute little off topic antagonistic post you made there, full marks for effort.

If casuals really did "own WoW" Blizzard would have mitigated the subscription losses experienced during Cata, instead they have plummeted quarter on quarter since LFR's inception. MOP is the most solo and casual friendly expansion yet but it has been a complete flop for Blizzard.

I am a casual player, I am really not that bothered about WoW anymore. I saw all of the T14 and T15 content in the space of two weeks and once I kill Garrosh and get my cloak I am unsubscribing. Doing LFR isn't fun, nobody enjoys it. It's typically bad tempered and everyone just wants to get it over and done and pickup their loot. The so called casuals have nothing to aspire to, nothing to work towards and no reason to keep a subscription all year round. People aren't going to want to kill Garrosh over and over on LFR for several months, most will do it a few times then call it quits. Compare that to ICC which Blizzard successfully milked for a full year.

Also if they do take the scenario path and do away with the traditional Tank, Healer, DPS core gameplay that the game has been built around since day one, they will lose even more subscribers. WoW isn't attracting enough new players interested in an easy MMO that can be played solo to replace the old ones that they are haemorrhaging.

Okay my apologies, I just don't see this as a casual vs hardcore topic and I don't think dredging up that old argument is helpful.

Ultimately I think that if you build a game around solid mechanics and a decent learning curve it doesn't matter if the difficulty is high. The Demon's Souls series has shown that players will take the time to learn a game and that there is a market for traditional skill based progression. If you set the bar high people will improve themselves so that they can clear it because otherwise the game ends there. Blizzard don't have that faith in their subscribers and this is where they have gone wrong in their pursuit of "bite sized content" which everyone has access to regardless of merit.

I think a problem is that raids are gated by time spent, rather than difficulty. (And by that I mean time that you schedule, not /played - for me that's actually a big difference.) Got no time to schedule, playing as and when you find some time? -> easy mode only. Got time for one, maybe two nights every week, but miss time pretty often? -> easy and medium (flex). Got three nights a week, time to show up most of the time? -> easy, medium and also hard (normal). Got time for 3 nights or more, will only miss time for sickness and funerals? -> congrats, you can now also do very hard (heroic). If you're willing to take vacation days to raid around the clock when new content hits you can also access super hard (world first race).

Compare that to a single player game, where the only factor that determines what difficulty you select is how big a challenge you want. If you want to play Demon's Soul on the highest difficulty you can do that, you don't have to schedule your life around it. Or compare it to people taking the day off for games like GTA V. You don't have to be extremely skilled at the game to do that, you only have to want to enjoy it for hours uninterrupted. How many take the day off to run the new LFR, if LFR is all they normally run?

At the end of the day, wow is an mmorpg, so this is probably unavoidable.